Robert Bordo

Associate Professor - Drawing

Robert Bordo is an Associate Professor of Art at The Cooper Union, New York, where he leads the Painting program. In 2003, he was a visiting critic for the MFA program at Yale University and the Glasgow School of Art as well as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. In 2007, he was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant.

In his most recent works Bordo continues to play with subject matter, both reducing and expanding upon the subjective language of painting. His new works highlight the ambiguity of content through an alternately humorous and self-conscious subterfuge. The paintings directly reflect the natural environment around him as well as the ephemeral effects of light in his studio. He filters these elements through a rich palette and a conceit of subject interchangeability. There is a fluctuation between abstraction and representation. The combination of silent spaces and named places indicates narratives of location and intention, yet the landscape is altered, erased and cropped, creating a tension between lyricism, reality and the strangeness of the natural world.

Bordo is represented by Alexander and Bonin, New York, where he has been the subject of 4 one-person shows since 1999, most recently in fall 2008. He has also exhibited with Galerie René Blouin, Montreal and Rubicon Gallery, Dublin. A catalogue with an essay by Aidan Dunne was published to accompany Rubicon's 2007 exhibition of Bordo's work. Bordo has collaborated with the choreographer Mark Morris in designing sets and costumes for several productions, including Henry Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas," which premiered in 1989 in Brussels and was revived in 1998 at Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and a recipient of Canada Council Art Grants and a grant from the Tesuque Foundation.

Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.